IPL 2024: At Sunrisers, the aim has been to be aggressive and take control of the Powerplay, says Travis Head

Strategy is the name of the game in the Indian Premier League (IPL), and Sunrisers Hyderabad seems to have found a new template to make the most of the Powerplay.

Travis Head, one of the architects behind this plan, reveals that the idea is to accelerate a steady opening partnership with Abhishek Sharma, crafting the journey with some powerful hits, before Heinrich Klaasen joins in the middle to rip apart the opponent in the middle overs.

With such an approach, Head has often maintained a strike rate closer to 200, and that essentially has helped him enjoy a head-turner of a season, hammering the fourth-quickest ton of the tournament against Royal Challengers Bengaluru.

“It’s dependent on where you are playing and how you structure your batting line-up. Here at the Sunrisers, the aim has been to take control of the Powerplay and be aggressive in the Powerplay,” Head said during a select media interaction on Friday.

“Myself and Abhi (Abhishek) and Klass (Klassen) are able to do that. So, that’s just a game. Every team has got different identities and different game plans and ours is to try to make the most of the Powerplay with the kind of batting we have got,” he said.

The last few months have been quite eventful for Head. After playing a key hand in guiding Australia to its ODI World Cup victory, Head returned to the IPL with Sunrisers and has so far amassed 235 runs from five outings. After a couple of disappointing campaigns, the Sunrisers look to be a confident unit under the leadership of World Cup-winning captain Pat Cummins.

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“We have always talked about leading into the games about trying to adapt to the conditions as quickly as we can and trying to communicate that throughout the batting lineup. It’s not gonna come off every single game, and you need to take risks,” Head said, drawing reference to its fixture against Punjab Kings, where Kagiso Rabada started off the proceedings brilliantly, forcing him and Abhishek to rotate strike and put the pressure back on the opponent.

“It’s not just going out and trying to smash it around everywhere. We want to have a positive mindset, and I think we are making really good decisions about where we try to hit the ball and who we try to attack. We have a lot of conversations around it and it’s working really nice at the moment,” he said.

In a fast-evolving format like the T20s, it’s never an easy task, but Head agrees that the much-debated Impact Player rule, indeed, has had an impact.

“I haven’t played a lot of T20 cricket over the last couple of years, but being added back into the T20 team in the last sort of 12 months, it feels a lot similar to international cricket. You have guys batting at No. 7 or No. 8 in international cricket, and they can bash it around. It’s the same sort of approach – you have to go as hard as you can because you’ve got batters behind you and you need to maximise it as much as you can because you’ve got so much power in the batting line up…”

However, Head agrees that it’s a bit different in domestic cricket. “You see that in the big bash in Australia where we don’t have the Impact Player, where your top-four batters – the strongest of guys and a lot of them from the Australian team – open the batting and try to bat the whole 20 overs and if you get to sort of six, seven or eight you feel like you’re on top but here in the IPL, some of the best hitters at the moment come in at No.6 or No.7. You look at guys like (Andre) Russell or Rinku Singh and that mirrors international cricket,” Head said.

With such heavy hitting, the pressure is obviously on the bowlers. “When you come to a World Cup in a couple of weeks time, we’re just going through sort of West Indian teams in England teams and Australian teams, and there’s so much power from six to eight. The Impact player looks batter friendly, but it mirrors international cricket as well…” he added.

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Back in 2016, he started his IPL career with Royal Challengers Bengaluru as a youngster and shared the dressing room with the likes of Virat Kohli, AB de Villiers among others. And, those experiences, eventually helped him handle trickier times in his career. Being among the high-profile exclusions from Cricket Australia’s contract list for 2021-2022, Head eventually got back into the grades and his World Cup heroics added gloss to his resume.

Back in those days, he made certain changes that eventually paid off. “When I lost my contract, I went away to South Australia and played well and found myself back in the team for the Ashes in 2021. The conversations that I had with Pat (Cummins) are well documented. The change in guard with him being captain (helped) and I guess the confidence he gave me to go out and play the way I do in domestic cricket…”

That, according to Head, was one of the major moments in his career. “I was able to go out and get runs in that Test match and sort of kickstart what has been the last three years. I played probably a little bit more aggressive game style, still worked hard on my technique and a few things….”

During those times, his friends and family backed him along with Cummins, and now with the two teaming up again in the IPL, Sunrisers Hyderabad would be hoping to go the distance.